Above the Fat

Above the Fat

Short stories by Thomas Chadwick

Includes stories shortlisted for the 2017 White Review Prize and the 2019 Galley Beggar Prize

The Republic of Consciousness Prize “Book of the Month” Selection for April 2019

At the top of a high-rise tower, buffeted by a gale, a desperate man clings onto a ledge and feels the passing minutes drag out into eternity. In a city swallowed by rising floodwaters, two friends embark on a leisurely stroll while the surging waves lick at their heels. A struggling entrepreneur stakes his future years on a plantation of trees that won’t reach maturity for a decade; a browbeaten bachelor stews over a lifetime’s disappointments in the moments it takes him to knot a tie; and when an arrogant chef devotes precisely two minutes to frying the perfect egg, he realises, as the seconds tick down, that dementia has robbed his father of half a century’s worth of memories.

Step inside the twilit realm of Thomas Chadwick: a place where the flow of time stalls and swells, halts and hastens, in utterly unpredictable ways. Urgent demands collide with outbreaks of eerie calm, stretches of idleness dovetail with sudden insistence on action, and an inertia without end can bloom from the limbo between the delayed departure of a boat and the arrival of cataclysmic climate change. Combining gentle lyricism with absurdity and biting humour, and finding poignancy in slippages between past, present, and foreboding future, Chadwick’s stories conjure up rare magic and cast a disorienting spell. Placid evenings distend into weeks of trouble before sundown, months of anxiety are distilled into a single heartbeat, and, from dawn to dusk, the duration of an entire day is neatly contained between the covers of a book.

Thomas Chadwick grew up in Wiltshire and now splits his time between London and Ghent. His stories have been shortlisted for the White Review Prize and the Galley Beggar Prize, as well as the Ambit Prize and the Bridport Prize. He is an editor of Hotel magazine.

Th[e] thwarting of ambition, and lowering of standards, is the recurring theme of Above the Fat, which identifies a millennial sense of lost opportunity and diminished expectation, handling it with subtlety and humour. … Throughout, Chadwick is insightful, his writing spare and bleakly comic. In this short debut collection, he stakes out his literary territory, identifying a topic and approaching it from multiple angles. There’s a clear need for writing which can investigate the fault lines which have emerged in society after the economic crash, and subsequent austerity. Chadwick, with his sharp wit, is well placed to address this.

Evocative and lingering. The writing throughout has a haunting undercurrent. … In both the ordinary and the more surreal, simple actions lead to disturbance. Much is contained and elicited within each sentence; years of experience captured within fleeting reactions. This entirely enjoyable collection offers depth and emotive complexity. It is an original and satisfying read.